When a helicopter goes down, the men on the ground get to work. From the wreckage of torn metal, black boxes, and lifeless bodies, a model of what went wrong rises.

The search for answers began with a single leaf of paper, rolled up on the ocean floor, 540 feet beneath the swells. The paper was lifted from the darkness by the lights of a remotely operated vehicle dropped over the side of a supply ship called the Atlantic Osprey. The men who piloted the ROV — from inside a quiet, windowless container that had been welded to the ship's deck — trained its cameras on the paper. They were working in black and white, more out of habit than anything else. When they did what they usually did, maintaining the underworks of oil platforms, color rarely factored into it; everything down there was machined from the same shade of gray. But now these men were doing different work, and they leaned into their monitors and tried to make out the black type on the white paper. They were able to read just a few words about how to fly a helicopter. "That's when we knew we were on the right track," Allan Chaulk says.

On the table in front of him, inside the Transportation Safety Board of Canada's engineering branch in Ottawa, Chaulk has rolled up a piece of paper into a cylinder smaller than a soda can. "About like that," he says. The impossible image of the paper on the vast ocean floor, anchored by silt and tiny pebbles, now occupies a permanent space in his memory bank. He can close his eyes and cover them with his hand, which he does often, and see the paper in front of him again.

Chaulk had expected to be on a different ship that weekend. He had planned to take a few days off from the TSB's Atlantic office in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, where he is one of the resident interpreters of aircraft wreckage. Chaulk, a native of Corner Brook, Newfoundland, was waiting for the ferry back home with his son, Kevin, and their snowmachines. They were going to ride the trails with some of the boys. That was before his cell phone rang. It was Mike Cunningham, Chaulk's boss at the TSB. "I might need you," Cunningham said.

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A few minutes earlier that morning — Thursday, March 12, 2009, around ten o'clock — Cunningham's own phone had rung. He was told that a helicopter, a Sikorsky S-92, had made an emergency ditch into the Atlantic about thirty-five miles southeast of St. John's, Newfoundland. It had been carrying workers out to the Grand Banks oil platforms when the pilots radioed that they had lost oil pressure and were going to drop into the water. The helicopter was owned and operated by a company called Cougar that flew out of the airport in St. John's; it was painted blue and white. Cunningham was told that Cougar had sent up one of its own helicopters to rescue the passengers. It hadn't yet reached the ditch site.

Phones continued to ring up and down the coast. Members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, B Division, housed in a building that overlooks the harbor in St. John's, were among the first to be notified. The RCMP has jurisdiction over the ocean. In the Major Crime Unit — where investigators would normally work homicides or armed robberies but also accidents involving mass fatalities to rule out foul play — a tall, soft-spoken constable named Rob Manuel opened a new missing-persons file. Details were sketchy; it wasn't even clear how many passengers were on board, now waiting in their life rafts to be rescued. But out of instinct, Manuel made his first note in a fresh pad of paper. Like most police investigators, he is fastidious about taking notes: The answers he seeks might surface in them later. It was 10:18 A.M.

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According to those notes, Manuel called Dr. Simon Avis, Newfoundland's chief medical examiner, exactly eighteen minutes later. Avis's book-lined office is in the basement of the Health Sciences Centre in St. John's, adjacent to the morgue. Avis is also tall, thin, with a trim goatee and sharp features. Manuel told Avis that his services would probably not be needed, but there was always that chance. While rows of ambulances filled the hospital parking lots and nurses lined the hallways upstairs to await the survivors, Avis made quiet preparations in his autopsy suite.

Finally, the first wave of rescuers reached the site. They reported that they had spotted the Cougar helicopter floating on top of the water.

"In hindsight," Manuel says, turning another page in his notes, "those reports were incorrect." There were other reports that a life raft had been spotted, and those reports turned out to be accurate, but no one yet knew if it was covered or uncovered, full or empty. It was in the nature of the investigators to assume the worst. Mike Cunningham, already named the investigator in charge of the incident, had made plans to fly to St. John's that afternoon; Allan Chaulk was driving from the ferry dock to Dartmouth, where he could catch a flight to St. John's first thing the next morning; Rob Manuel was busy trying to determine the actual number of passengers on board; Simon Avis worked to vacate and clean the metal slabs in the tiled room next to his office.

Soon after, Manuel received another report from the site — a survivor had been found. That raised spirits across the wires. Then further word — a body, too, had been recovered, and the life raft had turned out to be empty. There was no sign of anybody else. In the North Atlantic winter, even in their bright-orange survival suits, the others would need to be rescued within twenty-four hours, or they would be lost.

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Manuel eventually learned that eighteen people had been on board.

In cars, on planes, in autopsy suites, men did the math: one survivor, one deceased, sixteen missing. Those were the day's first hard facts.

Jeffrey Milstein

By Thursday night, families of the pilots and passengers had gathered in a hotel ballroom, anxious for more information. They held on to their hope all that night and through the following morning. Then on Friday afternoon, a little more than a day after the first reports of the crash, Cunningham stood in front of them: The rescue operation had been called off, he said, and the recovery operation would begin. "It was terrible," he says today. "I mean, what can you tell them? You have nothing."

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Chaulk boarded the Atlantic Osprey late Friday night and steamed out to the site. During the five-hour trip, he and others laid out their search grid. At that moment on that ship, the survivor and the body were not souls or even the vessels their souls once occupied: Nobody on board knew that the survivor lying sedated in a hospital bed was a twenty-seven-year-old ice watcher named Robert Decker, or that the body flown to Avis's autopsy suite was a twenty-six-year-old cafeteria worker named Allison Maher. They had been reduced to data points, dots on a rectangle cut from a seemingly endless ocean. Other dots were made by the empty life raft; the helicopter's blown-out door, which had been found floating on the surface; a Pelican case; and duffel bags packed by workers prepared to spend three weeks at sea.

The men on the ship mapped out the constellation of dots on their charts and dropped the ROV in its cage under one of them. They came up empty. Chaulk was disappointed but not surprised. He had been on the Atlantic Osprey to search for helicopters in the ocean before. Once, it had taken him a week to find what he was looking for, and that was in the relatively narrow confines of a bay. But this search — like the hunt for the missing Air France Airbus a few months later, in far deeper water a few thousand miles to the southeast — was unfolding in the middle of the ocean, open and featureless. While the ROV would hasten the work, with its two arms extended as though it were feeling its way through the dark, it had its own limitations. Trailing its umbilical cord, it couldn't scan the bottom in sweeps or loops for risk of tangles. It had to return to its cage in order to head back out, like a moray nosing out from its hole.

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The men had dropped the ROV under another dot and had been searching the darkness for nearly six hours when they found the piece of paper. They checked their watches and made notes and pushed the robot a little farther out on its line until they saw what looked like fabric. It was about the size of a hand towel, perhaps a bit of vinyl torn from a float. The men felt they were getting closer. But — a page torn from a flight manual, a ragged section of float — now they knew their search was a search for fragments rather than a whole, and the men braced themselves for what they might catch in their lights.

The ROV whirred farther into the darkness. The ocean floor lifted a little whenever it was disturbed, the silt turning the water into milk. The men squinted at their monitors, the ROV's lights casting fifteen or twenty feet into the murk. They didn't speak. Then they saw something alien waiting for them on the bottom of the cold ocean, a twisted mess of metal and cable and blade. If the men piloting the ROV hadn't known what they were looking for, they might not have guessed what they had found. But Chaulk knew almost immediately that the ROV had crept up on its target from behind, and now he was looking at the tail section of a Sikorsky S-92, at rest on its right side.

The ROV came around the tail and turned to scan the main section of the fuselage, which the men hoped would be intact enough for them to raise without fear of losing it. Their hearts sank. Even Chaulk's expert eyes weren't sure what they were taking in. It was as though he were looking at a puzzle not only in pieces but also turned inside out. He asked the men in that windowless container to toggle their displays from black-and-white to color. They hit the switch. That's when they began to learn. They saw blue-and-white aluminum, pairs of green rubber boots, and bright-orange survival suits, still wrapped around the men they were meant to save.

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Courtesy Transportation Safety Board of Canada

They were victims of mermaids, sirens, krakens, and giant squids.

There are parts of the world where the ocean seems incidental, a neighbor, a pretty picture out the window. Newfoundland is not one of those places. Here, the ocean has always been something else. Sometimes it is an animal, and sometimes it is a wife. It is almost always female, because it is almost always regarded through the eyes of men. It is a nurturer and a destroyer. For centuries, the men of Newfoundland took entire schools of cod from the ocean, and in exchange, the ocean took hundreds and thousands of Newfoundland's men. They simply didn't come back one morning, and they were counted among the ranks of the lost. Their widows would walk the barren shores in long dresses and look for traces, but they never found them. In Ireland, widows had better currents working in their favor; sometimes one would find her husband's white wool sweater balled up in the wet sand, the knit as good as dental records. But the women of Newfoundland never knew, exactly. They would never receive the comfort of fact. They could only imagine what out there took their men, and grief has a way of making the mind open up wider than it might. Looking out over all that water, the widows would believe that anything was possible. Death was magical then.

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Mike Cunningham has a widow's imagination. His family had fished for generations off Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and tended the lighthouse there, but Cunningham had chosen the sky over the sea as his preferred element. In 1981, he was a twenty-five-year-old pilot. His father, George, also flew. One afternoon that summer, George, his new wife, Pat, and their two children, a three-year-old girl and a one-year-old boy — Mike's half-brother and -sister — lifted off in their Cessna and out over the ocean. The plane crashed into the water not far offshore. George survived, as did the baby boy; Pat and the little girl drowned. Years later, when the baby boy grew up, he often wondered why he had lived when his mother and sister had not. The simple answer is, babies float. Before she died, Pat had pushed him out of the sinking plane and he had been picked up off the surface of the water. But buoyancy physics and a mother's love provide only so much resolution, and he often lay awake at night, wondering.

Mike Cunningham was also haunted by the accident. He was a pallbearer at the funeral; Pat and her daughter were buried in the same casket. The last time he had seen them alive, Mike had been in the bathroom and the little girl had knocked on the door, calling out his name, Mike! Mike! The memory of her voice still brings tears to his eyes.

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He can also remember going to the wreckage yard where his father's plane was kept after it was recovered from the ocean. He stood with his fingers in the chain-link fence and watched the TSB investigator crawl over the crumpled plane. The investigator's name was Dave Owen. Cunningham had asked Owen questions, and Owen had tried to answer them: The plane's engine had failed, probably because of water in the fuel line. Ten years later, in 1991, Owen hired Cunningham to work as an investigator at the TSB. "Fate," Cunningham says when asked how his career had unfolded. "I wanted to stand on the other side of that fence."

Accident investigators learn mostly on the job. They are divided into two branches of expertise. Technical investigators, such as Allan Chaulk, try to extract secrets from the crashed machine. Cunningham, because he had a university degree in psychology and because he was a pilot, began his career in human performance. Performance investigators try to put themselves in the shoes of dead men. One of the first lessons all of them learn is that plane crashes are rarely the result of one thing. "Finding the golden BB" is how investigators refer to those rare instances when they learn that a plane crashed because of a single catastrophic reason. "Typically, an accident has six or seven contributing factors," Cunningham says. "They call it the chain of events."

The investigator's job is to re-create that chain of events and try to find ways to prevent it from linking together again. That takes science of various kinds, it takes technical expertise, it takes rigor and method. But it also takes a certain capacity for dreaming. "I always try to put myself in the cockpit," Cunningham says. Over the years, he has imagined himself crashing a Piper Navajo into the river in Fredericton, New Brunswick, after the engines had failed; piloting an MK Airlines 747 cargo plane into the trees at the end of the runway in Halifax and being engulfed in flames; and now he imagined dropping a Sikorsky S-92 hard into the waters off Newfoundland.

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"There's a danger of getting caught up in that — a personal danger," he says. "But I think if you really want to understand... It's like having a tragedy like I had. If you don't go all the way to the wall, you might never understand what it's like to arrive there."

During those first few nights in St. John's, Cunningham lay in bed and disappeared into the ocean over and over again.

Jeffrey Milstein

On the Atlantic Osprey,the men looked at the wreckage on their monitors and tried to picture how it would respond to being raised. Normally, straps would be looped around the top deck — the tangle of mechanics at the base of the main rotor — and a crane would hoist the helicopter to the surface. But Chaulk was nervous. He knew that a lot of the components in the rotor's transmission were made from magnesium, which corrodes quickly in water, first turning purple and then into dust. He also knew that the helicopter, even broken open, would bring up thousands of pounds of ocean along with it. Once, Chaulk had watched film of a helicopter recovery in the North Sea: As soon as the wreckage had cleared the surface, the rotor snapped off, and the helicopter sank back to the bottom. It was never recovered. Telling the story, Chaulk covers his eyes with his hand once again. "I said to myself right there, That, I can never let happen to me."

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He joined the TSB in 1999, after beginning his career in aircraft maintenance. Now his job was to reverse-engineer what he once did: Instead of figuring out how to keep planes in the sky, he was charged with explaining why they fell out of it. In September 1998, Swissair 111 crashed off Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, shortly before Chaulk began his new job, and his first assignment was to help with the massive effort to reconstruct the plane, an MD-11, piece by tiny piece. The work had made an impression on him. In some ways, a plane that hits water can be more damaged than a plane that hits land, or at least it can be damaged differently. A plane that crashes into the ground crumples and folds into itself, the way cars accordion through their impact zones; a plane that crashes into water usually explodes instead, blown apart from the inside out by the column of water that surges through the fuselage. During the Swissair rebuild, Chaulk would lift a small fragment of wreckage out of the seemingly endless piles in the hangar, identify it, return it to its original shape, and "fracture match" it back into place. The puzzle was eventually finished, but not before Chaulk was repeatedly reminded about the tenderness of our flying machines. The most robust part of them is frequently the bodies they carry.

Now, looking at the monitors, Chaulk decided that was true here, too. Unlike the helicopter, the men on board, still strapped in their seats, looked much as they had when they had lifted off into the morning light. Chaulk stared at the monitors and into their faces — he could see their mustaches, their wedding rings — and he decided, for one of the first times in his life, that the machine could wait. The bodies would be raised first, on their own. The helicopter they would figure out later.

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Chaulk believed there were between ten and thirteen bodies inside the helicopter. After consulting with the ROV operators, he decided the dead would be raised still strapped in their seats. The seats were held in place by latch mechanisms. Fortunately, the ROV's two arms were deft enough for the operators to guide them to push the pins that held the latches in place. Once the latch had been opened, each seat could be tilted forward and lifted out of the tracks that ran along the floor. The seat and the man strapped into it were then gently placed by the ROV into a basket, which was brought to the surface by the ship's crane and laid to rest on the fantail. The body was unstrapped from the seat, the seat and the body were each tagged so they might forever be linked, and the body was zipped into a bag. It was somber work, but the men on the ship were propelled through the night by the feeling that with every husband and father they brought up from the bottom, another family had a chance to fill the hole that had been torn in it.

By Sunday, the crew of the Atlantic Osprey had recovered nine of the passengers. They decided to bring them to port. The ship returned to the crash site the next day, and the men in the windowless container managed to recover the remaining seven passengers — Chaulk had been conservative in his earlier counting — as well as the helicopter's black box. It was packed into a cooler filled with water and hand-delivered to Ottawa, where a man named Ted Givins was waiting with his computer and headphones. The bodies were taken to Simon Avis and his scalpels.

On Chaulk's third trip to the crash site, with his mind finally able to turn toward the wreckage, he thought about how neatly the pieces of his latest puzzle were falling into place. As recently as the 1970s, that helicopter and the men inside it might have been gone for good, the ocean swallowing them whole, along with their secrets. Instead, in only six hours, Chaulk had found them and the record of their last moments, stored in binary code on memory chips, and he had raised them into the air and the light, and now he believed that they would tell him everything he needed to know. On the deck of the Atlantic Osprey, he would bear witness to the end of mystery.

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They were victims of fate, mood, storms, and less-than-perfect luck.

That was the deal until the 1980s, when the men won the war of attrition, taking the last of the cod. But then the ocean presented Newfoundland with a different opportunity — vast, untapped pockets of light, sweet crude buried under the water where the cod once raced into nets. Platforms were erected across the Grand Banks, iceberg-resistant giants that rose out of the sea like monsters, and the oil they drank up returned prosperity to Newfoundland. But the contract with the ocean was the same as it always had been, only the terms had changed: oil for cod, riggers for fishermen.

Simon Avis surveyed the rows of bodies in his autopsy suite. In his long career as a forensic pathologist and medical examiner, he has lost track of the number of bodies he has dissected. "Two, maybe three thousand," he says. When he sits next to strangers on planes and they ask him what he does for a living, their next question is almost always about the parade of murder and accident victims he dissects, the assumption being that he spends most of his time extracting bullets from wounds or determining whether the knife had a serrated edge. He does that, but the vast majority of his work involves ordinary people who have died from ordinary means. He has become an expert at finding the signatures of heart attacks, embolisms, cancer, strokes. For Avis, the human body is a machine, and like Allan Chaulk, his job is to determine why the machine stopped working.

"I have a good imagination," Avis says, "but it's a different type of good. I can think around things. Forensic pathology is just like any other type of medicine. It's not a black-and-white science, at least not always. Sometimes the answers aren't obvious, and sometimes the answers won't come to me until after the fact. I don't consciously think about these things, but I know I've sometimes been in bed, half asleep, and woken up saying, That's why."

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Now his first job was to identify who was in front of him. He had a passenger manifest, eighteen names in a long column. One, Robert Decker, the survivor, was recovering upstairs; another, Allison Maher, the only woman on board and the only body recovered on the surface, had been crossed off the list. That left sixteen matches to make. Each man's survival suit had been bar-coded and scanned when he had boarded the helicopter, but Avis couldn't rely solely on the bar code. He had already spoken to the families, and he had asked them for physical descriptions and distinguishing features: scars, tattoos, bridgework. The cold of the ocean had preserved these, and as Avis unzipped each body from its bag and survival suit, he studied it, and he looked at his notes, and eventually each man was given a name.

Next, he had to determine the cause and manner of death. They weren't the same thing. A gunshot victim's cause of death would be the bullet lodged inside him. The manner would be how that bullet got there. That's where Avis's imagination comes into play. He sees the victims as living, breathing people, then he sees them on the slab in front of him, and he tries to fill in the spaces between.

Here the manner of death was simple: accident.

The cause required more work. He began with an external examination of each body. Then he x-rayed some of them, and he conducted full autopsies on others. There was little obvious trauma — few impact or crush injuries and no evidence of explosion or fire. He decided, in the end, that the helicopter's passengers and crew had suffered the same cause of death. All had drowned.

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Avis's conclusion had required a singular leap of faith: For all our diagnostic technology, there remains no indisputable test that proves someone has drowned. There might be evidence of drowning — a frothy liquid around the nose and mouth, water in the sinuses and lungs, water in the stomach — but there isn't always. Sometimes, drowning leaves no anatomical testimony. When a body is recovered from water and no other cause of death is uncovered, then the victim is assumed to have drowned. Drowning is the answer when it's the last answer left.

Avis passed on his findings to the other investigators, because it might help them in their work, and he met with the families, because his findings might help them, too. "No one likes to come to my office to sit down with me, because something bad has happened to someone they care about," he says. "However, I would say that most people who walk into this office walk out feeling better — just by knowing, by having their questions answered. And I'm still a doctor. It's not only the sick who need healing. Sometimes people can be perfectly healthy and need healing, too."

Avis walked each family through his imagination. He believed that everything had happened quickly. He believed the helicopter had plummeted toward the water, generating the kind of g-forces that would push most people into a state of unconsciousness. He estimated the helicopter struck the surface with an impact equal to twenty times the force of gravity, but in a way that had protected the people inside it. Then it sank to the bottom. Sixteen men, unconscious in their seats, took the ocean into their lungs. There was no apparent struggle, no pain. All of them had slipped under the surface together, and came to rest on that bed of silt and tiny pebbles.

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Ted Givins lifted the helicopter's black box out of the water in the cooler. On the wall in front of him, shelves were lined with the shredded remains of black boxes plucked from what the TSB engineers called "majors": Swissair (229 dead); Dryden, Ontario (1989, 24 dead); Gander, Newfoundland (1985, 256 dead); Air France (Toronto, 2005, no deaths, 309 survivors). This box was in fact orange, as they all are today, banded with reflective tape, and it was pristine. It looked as though it had just come off the factory floor.

Unlike most planes, which have separate recorders for flight data and cockpit voices, the Sikorsky S-92 houses both recorders in a single unit. Inside the box was a large fire-resistant canister, inside that canister was a small metal tube, and inside that tube was a circuit board shining with solid-state memory. The first generation of flight-data recorders, developed in the late 1950s, recorded just five parameters: air speed, heading, altitude, vertical acceleration, and time. Today's industry minimum is eighty-eight parameters. The Sikorsky S-92's flight-data recorder tracks five hundred parameters, at a rate of 256 words per second, for the previous twenty-five hours of flight. With it, Givins and his team can reconstruct a flight with such accuracy, they will later develop computer animations of each crash from the pilot's perspective, complete with needles spinning on the instrument panels. On the walls above the shelves of black boxes, Givins has hung poster-sized stills from his animations. They capture whatever it was the pilots last saw through their windows: a mountain, another plane, a house in the suburbs. The altitude gauges almost always display zero.

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The cockpit voice recorder, though dramatic and sometimes horrifying, frequently proves less useful to investigators. It typically contains four tracks: the pilot's headset, the copilot's headset, PA announcements, and an ambient microphone located somewhere in the cockpit. The recordings are usually loud and chaotic, static-filled, difficult to interpret. Givins and his team will transcribe the voice recorders in listening groups, as many as six men and women with their hands pressed over their headphones, trying to come to a consensus about what, exactly, transpired in those final moments. "The first time someone listens to one, they might get emotional," Givins says. "We've been doing this for so many years, it's almost, Okay, this is what we're going to hear." The voices are sometimes less important than the noise heard over them. Givins can deduce from the sound of the engines or rotors whether they were giving full power, he can hear which switches were being thrown and when, he can pick up unusual noises and determine whether it was an indication of mechanical distress or some unrelated sound. In one instance, he detected a strange rattle on the ambient microphone. After exhaustive research, he determined it was the doomed pilot's clipboard banging repeatedly against a panel.

Using both recorders, Givins began to map the entirety of the Sikorsky S-92's flight. He worked quickly and for long hours, because what he learned might help Chaulk and Cunningham narrow their focus in the field. The flight began nominally, the helicopter traveling a path straight enough to have been drawn with a ruler at an altitude of nine thousand feet. Then, twenty-seven minutes into the flight, the pilots radioed their Mayday about a sudden loss of oil pressure. They turned around, their path a little less steady, as though drawn freehand rather than with that ruler. The pilots requested clearance to return to St. John's. They descended quickly over the next seven minutes to eight hundred feet. The main rotor was still turning.

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And then, forty-three seconds before the helicopter hit the water, something very bad happened. Givins listened through his headphones, but all he could hear was silence, and silence on a cockpit voice recorder was never good. Later, by pulling apart some other measuring devices kept on board — such as the HUMS, the health-and-usage monitoring system — Givins would determine that the helicopter was still airborne, but it had lost electrical power. The recorders had shut down. The helicopter was falling apart, and the pilots had no choice but to ditch.

Jeffrey Milstein

Allan Chaulk watched the ROV lasso cables around the helicopter's transmission, as well as around the nose and tail. The men on the Atlantic Osprey had dropped a large steel cage, normally used to ferry pipe underwater, next to the wreckage. They began to lift the helicopter, and it did what Chaulk had feared it might: It began to string out, unspooling like a coil. But most of it held together, and the men carefully raised it over the cage, lowered it inside, and closed the mesh doors on top. Then they raised the cage with the crane, and Chaulk stood along the ship's railing and waited until the Sikorsky S-92 broke the surface. It was the first time he had seen the wreckage with his own eyes, and the men on the ship stared at it, silent again. What struck him immediately was the nose; it was pushed up from underneath. The helicopter had landed on its belly, he thought.

Wreckage can tell Chaulk a lot of things, but one of the most important things it can tell him is the geometry of a crash. Normally, he reads the surrounding terrain as well, the way detectives read a crime scene. A deep crater surrounded by untouched fields tells him that a plane probably crashed nose-first, out of control. A trail of damaged forest will usually yield the path and angle of descent. The gouges that propellers leave in the earth will tell him whether they were still turning and at what speed. But water gives up none of that. All he had was the wreckage.

The men left the helicopter in its cage and covered it with a tarp. They steamed back to St. John's, where they lifted the wreckage onto a flatbed truck and delivered it to a hangar at the airport. The seats and other pieces that had already been recovered were waiting there. The helicopter was cut out of the cage.

Chaulk began to make it whole again in his mind. The damage told him that the helicopter had fallen fast — dropping at a rate of more than one thousand feet per minute. The pushed-up tail, along with the nose, confirmed to him that the helicopter had landed on its belly, tipped slightly back; the damage also told him that the helicopter had been leaning to the right, the side on which it eventually settled. Scuff marks along the leading edge of the main rotor suggested that it was still spinning at the moment of impact. The tail rotor wasn't scuffed. The floor pan had stayed mostly intact, shielding the passengers from the worst of the impact, but the lightweight fuselage had blown open around them. It was held together mostly by cables and wiring. The emergency floats looked as though they had failed to deploy, which meant the helicopter had sunk nearly as quickly as it had fallen. Water had poured through the breaches, and by the time the wreckage had reached the bottom, it had collapsed in on itself, under a weight of more than 240 pounds per square inch.

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Already, Cunningham had researched previous incidents involving the Sikorsky S-92. Last July, a helicopter had made an emergency landing in Australia after losing oil pressure. The cause had proved to be three titanium studs that had bolted the oil-filter bowl assembly to the main gearbox, which powers the rotors. The studs had broken, the bowl assembly had come loose, and oil had stopped running through the main gearbox. Cunningham had told Chaulk about the studs, and he and his team immediately set about looking for them. They found the oil-filter bowl assembly, about the size of a flower vase. The studs each occupied a corner of its triangular base. One of the studs was broken clean through, and a second could be turned by hand. Later, a TSB metallurgist examined them through a scanning electron microscope and confirmed that metal fatigue had caused the studs to come apart, leading to the catastrophic loss of oil pressure. But Chaulk already knew that. He knew, standing in that hangar, that he had found the golden BB.

Chaulk, Cunningham, and the rest of the team would eventually call the loss of the studs the "initiating event" that led to a series of failures, culminating with the loss of power forty-three seconds before the crash. By opening the main gearbox and examining every purple tooth on every gear, they also determined that fifteen seconds before the crash, the tail rotor had stopped spinning. In the absence of oil, its gear had shredded. Now the picture had become all too clear: The pilots, without the ability to turn the helicopter, were left with a single, long shot out. They could try a complex emergency landing called an autorotation: By pitching the helicopter to harness the wind, they might generate enough air flow to keep the main rotor spinning during its final descent; they could then cushion the ditch by raising the helicopter's nose in the final few seconds before impact, the tail taking the brunt of the energy. The scuff marks on the rotor told Chaulk that the pilots had been partially successful in their attempt. They still had some lift. But they had come in too heavy and listing to the right. They hadn't been able to pull up in time.

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Cunningham put himself in the cockpit once again. Most pilots in crisis situations revert to flying by hand and by gut. He looked out the windows, out at the water, the featureless blue rising fast. Then a terrible sound, a tearing, a grinding, and the helicopter stopped responding to his commands. It began to buck. He fought to maintain consciousness. He would have to time his last-second lift perfectly. He waited to pull back on the stick. He tuned his ears to the screaming machine running dry, and he clenched his teeth, and he understood that despite all his training, despite all his technology, the rest of his life and the lives of the passengers behind him would depend on luck and his best guess. He guessed his speed, and he guessed his altitude. But he crashed into the water, and he sank to the bottom of the ocean, where he waited for someone to come down and tell him it wasn't his fault.

Jeffrey Milstein

They were the victims of three titanium studs.

In the days following the crash, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered every Sikorsky S-92 to the ground and their titanium studs replaced by steel ones. Several weeks later, in mid-May, Cougar resumed its flights to the oil platforms. Some workers refused to board the helicopters again, choosing instead the long voyage by ship.

Others — in Australia, in Scotland, in Newfoundland — strapped themselves into their seats and lifted over the ocean.

The investigators will never see the helicopters that don't crash; they will never know the faces of the men and women they saved through their work. But they know almost everything about the seventeen people who died that morning in March. They have received cards and letters from wives and children, with handwritten notes at the bottom thanking them for bringing their husbands and fathers home and for allowing those left behind some of the comfort of fact and to sleep without having to wonder. "I don't want to jinx things," Mike Cunningham says, "but this accident might be one where every question gets answered."

Only a single mystery remains. His name is Robert Decker. He stayed in his hospital bed for three weeks before he could be asked about what he could remember. Constable Manuel was charged with interviewing Decker. Manuel has talked people through tragedy before. He has dozens of open files filled with notes about people lost at sea, in forests, while hitchhiking. On April 8, he sat down with Decker in a small interview room at the RCMP headquarters, overlooking the harbor. Spring had come, and the ice had started to melt. When Decker came into the building through the glass doors, people watched him out of the corners of their eyes, and they spoke about him in whispers. Manuel can't discuss most of the questions and answers that were exchanged in that room, but he will say that interviewing Decker was one of those experiences that can change the way a man thinks about the world. "It takes a lot to make an impression on me," Manuel says. "But I had a lot of admiration for him, the way he was able to keep it together."

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There are theories about how Decker survived, but his memory is imperfect, and they will likely remain theories. They are the same theories that explain how Allison Maher found her own way to the surface. They were the two youngest passengers on board. They might not have lost consciousness like the others, or they might not have lost it for as long. They might have woken up when the helicopter crashed. They might have woken up when it filled with water. Decker believes he escaped through a broken window. Perhaps Maher managed to unstrap herself and swim through the blown-out door. Or maybe she found another broken window, or maybe it was the same one Decker believes he pulled through. They both kicked toward the surface. Maybe they held hands. Maybe they were leagues apart. At the end of their swims, Decker had made it, and Maher had drowned. Maybe Decker got out more quickly. Maybe he had bigger lungs, or maybe he had more air left in them. Maybe it came down to the seat he picked that morning. Maybe it was just another accident in a long series of accidents.

"Sometime," Allan Chaulk says, "it would be an interesting equation in physics to figure out how someone got out of a machine and someone didn't." When a plane crashes, there is a half second after impact when the universe expands. The fuselage swells, and cracks, and buckles, and there are openings. If all the tumblers line up, if the physics are on their side, passengers might find their way through them. They might be thrown from a fireball and into a cornfield in Sioux City, Iowa, or they might be plucked off a Czech hillside after falling from thirty-three thousand feet, or they might be found next to the bodies of their father and mother and brother in the wreckage of a plane outside Detroit.

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And then, like Robert Decker, most of them will walk out of the hospital or the interview room and they will disappear. They will ask not to be disturbed, and they will close their doors and windows, and they will sit alone in their wonder and their guilt. Even the best answer men will fail them. They will be told that they are the lucky ones, that the human body is a marvel, that strange things happen, that babies float. But that won't stop their questions. They will be the ones burdened by a corrosive mystery and an opaque grief. For survivors, there will be no facts. They will never be able to read a report that will tell them the cause and manner of life.

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